Welcome to the underwater world of the seven seas, in Aquaman, starring Jason Momoa in the title role.

The film reveals the origin story of half-human, half-Atlantean Arthur Curry and takes him on the journey of his lifetime—one that will not only force him to face who he really is, but to discover if he is worthy of who he was born to be … a king.

Aquaman (superhero movie trailer).

]]>https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/aquaman-final-trailer/feed/038513NASA will look for Martian life with 2020 Rover.https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/nasa-will-look-for-martian-life-with-2020-rover/
https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/nasa-will-look-for-martian-life-with-2020-rover/#respondMon, 19 Nov 2018 17:18:24 +0000https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/?p=38511NASA has chosen Jezero Crater as the landing site for its upcoming Mars 2020 rover mission after a five year search.

The rover mission is scheduled to launch in July 2020 as NASA’s next step in exploration of the Red Planet. It will not only seek signs of ancient habitable conditions – and past microbial life – but the rover also will collect rock and soil samples and store them in a cache on the planet’s surface.

NASA and ESA (European Space Agency) are studying future mission concepts to retrieve the samples and return them to Earth, so this landing site sets the stage for the next decade of Mars exploration.

“The landing site in Jezero Crater offers geologically rich terrain, with landforms reaching as far back as 3.6 billion years old, that could potentially answer important questions in planetary evolution and astrobiology,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “Getting samples from this unique area will revolutionise how we think about Mars and its ability to harbour life.”

Jezero Crater is located on the western edge of Isidis Planitia, a giant impact basin just north of the Martian equator. Western Isidis presents some of the oldest and most scientifically interesting landscapes Mars has to offer. Mission scientists believe the 28-mile-wide (45-kilometer) crater, once home to an ancient river delta, could have collected and preserved ancient organic molecules and other potential signs of microbial life from the water and sediments that flowed into the crater billions of years ago.

NASA will look for Martian life with 2020 Rover.

Jezero Crater’s ancient lake-delta system offers many promising sampling targets of at least five different kinds of rock, including clays and carbonates that have high potential to preserve signatures of past life. In addition, the material carried into the delta from a large watershed may contain a wide variety of minerals from inside and outside the crater.

The geologic diversity that makes Jezero so appealing to Mars 2020 scientists also makes it a challenge for the team’s entry, descent and landing (EDL) engineers. Along with the massive nearby river delta and small crater impacts, the site contains numerous boulders and rocks to the east, cliffs to the west, and depressions filled with aeolian bedforms (wind-derived ripples in sand that could trap a rover) in several locations.

“The Mars community has long coveted the scientific value of sites such as Jezero Crater, and a previous mission contemplated going there, but the challenges with safely landing were considered prohibitive,” said Ken Farley, project scientist for Mars 2020 at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “But what was once out of reach is now conceivable, thanks to the 2020 engineering team and advances in Mars entry, descent and landing technologies.”

When the landing site search began, mission engineers already had refined the landing system such that they were able to reduce the Mars 2020 landing zone to an area 50 percent smaller than that for the landing of NASA’s Curiosity rover at Gale Crater in 2012. This allowed the science community to consider more challenging landing sites. The sites of greatest scientific interest led NASA to add a new capability called Terrain Relative Navigation (TRN). TRN will enable the “sky crane” descent stage, the rocket-powered system that carries the rover down to the surface, to avoid hazardous areas.

]]>https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/nasa-will-look-for-martian-life-with-2020-rover/feed/038511Was ‘Oumuamua’ a light sail probe visiting the Solar System? Dr. Avi Loeb chats.https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/was-oumuamua-a-light-sail-probe-visiting-the-solar-system-dr-avi-loeb-chats/
https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/was-oumuamua-a-light-sail-probe-visiting-the-solar-system-dr-avi-loeb-chats/#respondMon, 19 Nov 2018 17:03:27 +0000https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/?p=38509Dr. Avi Loeb of Harvard University (as well as the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) does a little video about the background and science behind the oddness of the recent fly-through of the Oumuamua object, and why science suggests it might have been a solar sail probe of some sort on a fly-by.

Oumuamua a solar sail?

]]>https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/was-oumuamua-a-light-sail-probe-visiting-the-solar-system-dr-avi-loeb-chats/feed/038509Once Upon a Deadpool (trailer).https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/once-upon-a-deadpool-trailer/
https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/once-upon-a-deadpool-trailer/#respondMon, 19 Nov 2018 16:29:40 +0000https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/?p=38505Here’s the trailer for the PG-friendly cut of Deadpool 2, in which Deadpool recounts the Deadpool 2 movie to a kidnapped Fred Savage, an oddly timely satire of The Princess Bride, given the author of said novel’s recent passing from old age.

Once Upon a Deadpool (trailer).

]]>https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/once-upon-a-deadpool-trailer/feed/038505Doctor Who: Series 11 (or 36 depending on how you count): Episode 7: Kerblam! by Pete McTighe.https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/doctor-who-series-11-or-36-depending-on-how-you-count-episode-7-kerblam-by-pete-mctighe/
https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/doctor-who-series-11-or-36-depending-on-how-you-count-episode-7-kerblam-by-pete-mctighe/#respondSun, 18 Nov 2018 20:04:16 +0000https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/?p=38482Is it me or do other people have no concept of time and space when it comes to contacting let alone delivering to the time-travelling Doctor?

Be careful, you might be buying spoilers.

The TARDIS gets some shaking up as it receives a delivery from the Kerblam warehouse. It’s a bit late and missed a few regenerations but the Doctor looks great in a fez. The box also contains a help message and so they go to the warehouse moon orbiting the planet Kandoka and undercover to find out what is going on. Considering the Doctor is scanned you would have thought her IQ would have been measured as being much higher as Graham gets the higher job…although not for long. She swaps with him to get into invoicing to track down who sent the message. With the number of people missing going up, the Doctor gets annoyed and determined to get to the bottom or rather the head of what is going on. The rest you have to watch for yourself.

Hands up all of you who thought Kerblam is the future of Amazon? One will have to wonder if they will take this version as their next upgrade. Be careful with what you touch in the packaging in future. I would have thought all the Team TARDIS would have had to wear uniforms even on their first day.

In many respects, as Ryan was a warehouse worker, this should have been his story although Yaz seems to take the lead, next to the Doctor again.

There are a few mysteries. As the deliveries have already gone out at least once, including the one to the TARDIS, that means people must have already died in large quantities already.

As this opening season is going through all the basic storylines, an allegory for the present warehouse deliveries had to be on the cards. With the mixture of mechanoids and organics, we have our Science Fiction element although it could be run as a general genre story without such trappings. Getting something truly SF is going to get harder.

You do have to wonder how one moon could be large enough to handle deliveries across the galaxy. It’s also a very humans only environment and we all know that there are more than enough alien species out there to get in the way of the process.

It’s basically a good story although I poked a couple holes in it. This is one occasion where the Doctor should really have gone back to when the trouble started. I mean, she has a TARDIS after all, what time she arrives could be at her discretion unless there is a problem with crossing over her earlier regenerations lives. Even so, there’s at least 6 years or even more when you bear in mind her previous regeneration was smashing down a wall for a millennia before she arrives. That’s a lot of potential people dead in the meantime.

]]>https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/doctor-who-series-11-or-36-depending-on-how-you-count-episode-7-kerblam-by-pete-mctighe/feed/038482Monsters Of The Week: The Complete Critical Companion To The X-Files by Zack Handlen & Todd Vanderwerff (book review).https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/monsters-of-the-week-the-complete-critical-companion-to-the-x-files-by-zack-handlen-todd-vanderwerff-book-review/
https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/monsters-of-the-week-the-complete-critical-companion-to-the-x-files-by-zack-handlen-todd-vanderwerff-book-review/#respondFri, 16 Nov 2018 15:03:24 +0000https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/?p=38478I have to confess some confusion with the title of Zack Handlen and Todd Vanderwerff book, ‘Monsters Of The Week: The Complete Critical Companion To The X-Files’ as I thought it was about what creatures Mulder and Scully encountered every week when I first selected it. Just goes to show, it pays to pay attention sub-titles. The writers, as explained in the multiple introductions, including one from Chris Carter, have written essays on-line about ‘The X-Files’ and now have it out there in book form.

Don’t expect to see an episode by episode synopsis as they expect you to know your subject matter, although I think there should have been more memory joggers with the later seasons. What they are doing is expressing some analysis of the story elements and their thoughts on the subject. They aren’t writing together necessarily and are often writing apart on different episodes.

I like the fact that they do identify other characters actors in the course of this book and the occasional one’s like Xander Berkley and Zeljo Ivanek have risen in popularity over the years. I’m less sure about the connection to ‘Twin Peaks’, though. Both series were filmed in Canada, so it stands for reason and necessity that Canadian actors would be used in both shows. If Carter truly wanted to make a stronger connection, then surely he would have used some of ‘Twin Peaks’ American stars. Indeed, the footnote comment on page 77 testifies from Carter that they used the Vancouver-based actors often 5 times over in different roles.

I should point out that there is the occasional time-out with interviews with various writers from the series giving their own insights.

Something that I can be critical about is how the episode title and minimal credits are so small compared to the sub-title and main text when really you do want it the other way around just to keep track if you want to dig something out quickly.

I’m not sure if I agree with them that teacher Phyliss Paddock in ‘Die Hand Die Verletzt’ was the devil as its clear she was a witch sorting out a bad coven.

Don’t think this book is laden with plot details. Poor Queequeg, Scully’s dog, could have gone on to greater things.

Some mistakes will stick out. They say it was the eldest son who stayed with his mother in ‘Home’. I looked this up on the Net and they say the same thing so this might be a collective error. The way Mrs. Peacock talks to her son prior to driving away at the end about knowing Sherman and George tends to suggest this is her youngest son Edmund. I mean if Edmund was the oldest why would she be glad he had spent some time with Sherman and George for their experience if he was the oldest? It would be the other way around.

Season 4’s ‘Leonard Betts’ is considered one of their favourite stories and the way the detail of their appraisals goes up from that point shows the effect it had on them.

There is one question that comes out of ‘Little Potatoes’ is that Eddie Van Blundht’s four children are likely to have his same shift-shaping ability. However, their focus is more on whether Van Blundht raped the four women which I’m less sure about. Misrepresenting himself in different guises definitely but rape is a violent act against an unwilling person which doesn’t appear to be the case. Had the real people or at least their representation of Luke Skywalker had turned up, then they would surely have been persuaded to have had sex with them.

Season 5’s appraisal of ‘The Post-Modern Prometheus’ has to be their longest running at 6½ pages. Some episodes only reach a page but reading through this book, you can easily spot where both writers lose their enthusiasm from time to time.

There is a sense of lagging in both writers as they write about Season 6 and production moving to California. It’s a shame that neither of them knew or considered the reason for actor Nicholas Lea’s absence for a year as he was in John Woo’s ‘Once A Thief’ for a season. That show’s worth a look by the way. With the episode ‘Agua Mala’, they wonder why freshwater can beat the salt water tentacles. I would have thought that was easy, freshwater diluted it.

I often think the contribution of Mark Snow’s music adds to the tone of each episode is something often overlooked even here.

In some respects, I’m grateful that the footnotes are on the same pages at the main text. Just a shame that the superscript numbers are too small to find easily. In most cases, I can’t see why the footnotes couldn’t have been incorporated into the main text.

I spread my reading of the advance copy of this book over a few weeks so I could maintain my own freshness and this is probably the best way to read this book as it is a really long read. Much of this book is their opinions than deep analysis. In terms of selling points, the sections with mini-interviews with Chris Carter and his writers is required reading. More so as he had no set plans for the mythology other than letting it grow organically. The fact that it also contains the latest two seasons of ‘The X-Files’ which brings something earlier books haven’t covered.

My criticisms above are just some of the things you might take to task yourselves but as this book is mostly opinion pieces then you are allowed to disagree or even agree. As such, the book does make for an interesting read if you want to supplement your watching of ‘The X-Files’ again.

]]>https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/monsters-of-the-week-the-complete-critical-companion-to-the-x-files-by-zack-handlen-todd-vanderwerff-book-review/feed/038478The Dr. Phibes Companion by Justin Humphreys (book review).https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/the-dr-phibes-companion-by-justin-humphreys-book-review/
https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/the-dr-phibes-companion-by-justin-humphreys-book-review/#respondFri, 16 Nov 2018 12:59:55 +0000https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/?p=38475Every time I looked through publisher BearManor Media’s catalogue, I spotted the title ‘The Dr. Phibes Companion’ by Justin Humphreys and asked about its availability and got told not yet. That is, until last month and a jump of glee. The two ‘Dr. Phibes’ films starring Vincent Price are black humour horror of a seriously disfigured musician/engineer who is seeking revenge against the surgeons who failed to save his wife, Victoria, in the operating theatre. To do this, in ‘The Abominable Dr. Phibes’ (1971) he uses the ten plagues of Egypt from the Old Testament as his template.

For the sequel, ‘Dr. Phibes Rises Again’ (1972), is now seeking eternal life for Victoria and himself in Egypt and an immortal man who has a secret elixir. Of course, various people get in the way and have to be removed. Both films were amongst the earliest horror films I saw in the cinema and hadn’t seen any of Vincent Price’s early films at the time. Grisly but great viewing.

With this book, you get the history behind the films from the original 400 page script by James Whiton and William Goldstein, who were medical doctors, not done to standard format and how the basic idea was refined and polished other writers, including director Robert Fuest. I should point out that Fuest was a set designer on ITV’s 1960s ‘The Avengers’ before turning to directing and he didn’t hesitate in getting the likes of Brian Clemens and Albert Fennell involved or, indeed, various actors he directed for a couple days work.

If you ever wondered just what Phibes silent assistant, Vulnavia (actress Virginia North in the first film and due to her pregnancy replaced in the second film by Valli Kemp) actually was, you do get more than a few clues here. Personally, I would have preferred some ambiguity and there still is to some extent.

For those who are interested in tracking down the re-use of sets and props from these two films, you’ll have plenty to watch in other horror films from this time period as Humphreys guides you through a selection of British made horror films. The dry pool where Dr. Vesalius (actor Joseph Cotton) has to operate on his son was the real thing on the Elstree studio lot.

There is an examination of the attempts to make a third film in the series and why there wasn’t, although the original writers did do other books about the characters.

Following up from all of this, we get a serious look at the lives of director Robert Fuest, set designer Brian Eatwell and set photographer John Jay. Of them, Eatwell is the career to show some real interest in as amongst the other films he contributed to are ‘The Man Who Fell To Earth’, both ‘Three Musketeers films and ‘Walkabout’.

Both ‘Phibes’ films are stylised films that literally broke the mould for avoiding the cobwebby visions of other horror films up to that point. It was a shame that the producers removed much of the comedy to the sequel thinking the Americans wouldn’t get it and makes me wonder if the original footage is still hidden somewhere in a studio out there.

If you enjoyed the films then you will want this book. If you haven’t seen them, then do so first and then learn more. You can almost hear Vincent Price as Phibes giving his chuckle at the end. Now, where’s that rainbow.

]]>https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/the-dr-phibes-companion-by-justin-humphreys-book-review/feed/038475Edgar Allan Poe: Ghastly Tales From The Master Of The Macabre (book review).https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/edgar-allan-poe-ghastly-tales-from-the-master-of-the-macabre-book-review/
https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/edgar-allan-poe-ghastly-tales-from-the-master-of-the-macabre-book-review/#respondThu, 15 Nov 2018 19:03:01 +0000https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/?p=38472It’s probably impossible to overstate the influence of Edgar Allan Poe on popular fiction. To pick two celebrated examples, the weird tales of H.P. Lovecraft and the ‘Sherlock Holmes’ stories of Arthur Conan Doyle have obvious precursors among the works of Poe and, if you follow these lines of descent through to the present day, it’s hard to find anything in modern detective fiction, dark fantasy or supernatural horror that doesn’t owe something to the old master.

On the other hand, Poe is perhaps a bit less widely read today than he was in the past and where Lovecraft and Doyle remain among the front rank in terms of popularity. Perhaps Poe has become something of a connoisseur’s choice, familiar enough to those studying American literature, but less often read by those still at high school. That’s a pity, because Poe remains very modern in many ways and his shorter stories especially are highly accessible.

This new collection of 27 stories and poems brings together what’s essentially the best of Poe’s output, and like other collections from this publisher, does so at a very reasonable price. Indeed, for £14.99, this collection is pretty much a must-have for any fan of weird fiction, including all the essential and influential works, from his most famous poem, ‘The Raven’, through to his only published novel, ‘The Narrative Of Arthur Gordon Pym Of Nantucket’.

Of all Poe’s works, ‘The Masque Of The Red Death’ is one of the most familiar, thanks to its brevity, simplicity and delightfully modern take on the traditional morality play. As such, it’s routinely included in compilations of horror fiction aimed at young adults and has been adapted many times into films, comics, albums and even art installations. Most readers will sense the inevitability of the ending long before it happens and ‘The Masque Of The Red Death’ is really more of a beautifully structured tableau than anything else.

By contrast, ‘The Pit And The Pendulum’ is a much more challenging read, not because it is lengthy or verbose, but simply because Poe brilliantly increases the tension with each paragraph. Indeed, the story itself is anachronistic, placing the Spanish Inquisition alongside the Napoleonic Wars, while the torture methods used are as over-complicated as they are ghastly. But of course describing the reality of religious persecution was not Poe’s aim, but rather an exercise in psychological and physical terror, which Poe accomplishes masterfully.

While Poe frequently created imaginary or historical worlds for the purposes of unnerving his readers, he wasn’t beyond using contemporary situations if they suited his purpose. In ‘The Premature Burial’, he taps into one of the most famous Victorian Era anxieties. A lesser writer would simply have described the predicament of a person erroneously entombed, but Poe cleverly inverts that, by having the protagonist so afflicted with fear of being buried alive that he repeatedly slips into longer and longer periods of catalepsy.

Included in this collection are the three Auguste Dupin stories, ‘The Murders In The Rue Morgue’, ‘The Mystery Of Marie Roget, and ‘The Purloined Letter’. Widely recognised today as an early example of the sort of detective fiction that relied on analysing clues and then using them to deduce the course of events surrounding a crime. Arthur Conan Doyle implies as much when John Watson compares Holmes to the fictional Dupin, though Holmes himself is rather unimpressed by that, describing Dupin as ‘a very inferior fellow’. In fairness to Holmes, the Dupin stories have perhaps aged less well than Poe’s weird fiction. On the other hand, there are some interesting similarities to be drawn between Poe’s work and Doyle’s. ‘The Purloined Letter’ has a similar theme to ‘A Scandal In Bohemia’, while ‘The Murders In The Rue Morgue’ arguably invents the so-called ‘locked room mystery’ memory solved in such stories as ‘The Speckled Band’.

So many of the stories in this collection have become paragons of their type, such that it would be impossible to do them justice by discussing each of them here. Suffice it to say that ‘The Cask Of Amontillado’ remains one of the most famous revenge tales in English literature, not only inspiring many other writers, but having been adapted into films and comics many times. ‘The Gold-Bug’ is another famous short story, but one that includes both a substitution cipher and a clever mechanism that need to be mastered before the protagonist can recover the treasure.

‘The Fall Of The House Of Usher’ is perhaps the best known of Poe’s longer works and, as such, demonstrates his ability to develop characters every bit as elegantly as his mysteries and psychological horrors. Students of English literature continue to read and study this work closely because of its depth. Not only are the characters important in what they say and do, but the very surroundings play their parts, too, not least of all the fabric of the house itself. Generations of critics have picked out themes as diverse as drug abuse, prophecy, supernatural horror, mental health and, of course, the suggestion of incest between the two Usher siblings.

There are some poems here too, notably ‘The Raven’, the one poem of Poe’s that even casual fans of weird fiction will know about thanks in part to numerous adaptations, including a Vincent Price film of 1963. The gimmick, if you will, is the single word answer the raven returns to each of the questions posed by the narrator: ‘Nevermore!’ As the context of the questions asked changes, this reply transcends the vaguely comical into a mood of deep despair. While the location doesn’t actually change, the narrator finds himself in a sense trapped by the raven’s words, unable to return to the happiness he once enjoyed before the death of his lover, Lenore.

]]>https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/edgar-allan-poe-ghastly-tales-from-the-master-of-the-macabre-book-review/feed/038472How To Invent Everything by Ryan North (book review).https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/how-to-invent-everything-by-ryan-north-book-review/
https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/how-to-invent-everything-by-ryan-north-book-review/#respondThu, 15 Nov 2018 12:59:13 +0000https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/?p=38469The basis of Ryan North’s book, ‘How To Invent Everything’ is transporting yourself into the past by a time machine but alas breaks down and you’re stuck there. No matter which century, this book is not so much a survival guide but the means to make where you are a better place and removing the centuries of inaccuracy that our current civilisation was built upon. He doesn’t make allowances for the time scale or whether the natives or animals won’t look at you for lunch to get all of this book instigated or help in the order you should do things.

Of course, this will also change the future although North also points out even when some of these discoveries were known, they were also ignored so presumably time will sort itself out no matter what you do.

Having said that, the book does work well in terms of show the evolution of various things over the centuries so you get the original time scale, although not always why it took so long, principally caused by lack of initiative, stoicism or religion. Over the 17 chapters, North looks at everything from language to the sciences and farming and technology, with a look at music and even computers. You have charts for instant comprehension which makes it useful for comparisons.

That’s not to say there aren’t some good things in here. I like the reminder that the USA still hasn’t caught up with the rest of the world with the metric system. Even if they prefer some pre-metric measurements, that shouldn’t be an issue. After all, we in the UK have both measurement systems co-existing together and I suspect in the long term only metrics will be left. This isn’t likely to happen overnight. The American insistence on their measurements resulted in some recent Mars probes crashing because there was an assumption that there was shared measurements.

North’s means to test the food that you can eat in the past would be all well and good but it doesn’t support diabetics like me. It would make more sense to watch what the natives or animals are eating successfully as a guideline as to what to try. North makes a good point that the early vegetations looks nothing like how we have it today but it still takes time to in-breed to make the crops grow larger. The three field rotation, still needs tools to fallow the ground to plant seeds and that’s a lot of hard labour that the time traveller is going to find hard work.

The problem with North describing the plants and animals you need to pick to cultivate and tame is there are no illustrations or photos, let alone where they might be growing, which is going to make things somewhat difficult to distinguish them. After all, the earlier you go back, the more primitive looking plants and animals will look. These days, people have problems even knowing what farm animals look like. You also need the skill of a poacher if you want to catch a lot of these animals alive if you want to domesticate breeds and you do have to wonder how long North thinks you will live. Unfortunately, there is nothing on how to trap them.

There are some illustrations, especially showing how to use yokes on cattle and horses although I think lessons in creating and using a blacksmith’s equipment might have been handy first. Without that, ploughing large fields could become a big obstacle. Even if you aren’t or can’t plan to grow rice, there should be consideration for irrigation of the cultivated land. I can see a scenario where all the hard work is for nothing if you suddenly had a drought.

Don’t take it for granted that even some apparently normal things won’t take you off your stride. If you’re vegetarian or even vegan, will you stop eating bread knowing that there are live yeast spores in it as well as those cooked when making it? North also likes making alcoholic drinks, although I can find better uses for alcohol than drinking it, although it might befriend the locals.

In many respects, I wish North had prioritised the order to do things in, even if it would look like a modern day survival manual. Certainly, building a kiln would be one of the first things to be built as it can be used for so many things like pot-making and smelting ore for metals. Using it for cooking, less so. Smelting ore will give a variety of metals and if you’ve got cinnabar, then you’ll release mercury and you don’t want any of it or its oxides in your food, not unless you’re considering insanity as a way of life. Considering cinnabar comes up later under thermometers and how to smelt it, you would think this needs to be covered. North points out all the uses of glass but one important one, a convex lens is rather handy to start fires and saves a lot of time.

One of the worse things is having notes at the back of the book and bottom-notes on the pages than unite them all together in the main text. If you were trapped in the past, you wouldn’t want to be flicking across pages and cross-checking the bottom of the pages all the time. I think I would have rather had it all together. None of which is helped by North joking about the footnotes after a while as even he’s fed up doing them. When it came to showing machinery and putting the science laws in the italic footnotes demeans their importance.

North might be making the assumption that the time traveller is also a scientist but it would be easy to overlook some principles when you’re in a spot of trouble in getting things right. Some of the basic machinery, like pistons, needs a lathe to produce and there should have been some emphasis on how to make the tools to make other things.

North makes assumptions that you know what and where to find things like lye when making soap. This is covered in the appendix but really it would have made more sense to have how to make all these compounds in the chemistry chapter than split up. I was expecting more from the chapter on chemistry, although he does explain the different bonding the atoms go through to make compounds. Logistically, I would have preferred to have seen a bit more on making useful compounds by breaking down particular materials and recombining them.

The examination of sexually transmitted diseases, let alone toilet protocols will make you shudder. Although I see the benefits of making toilet paper than a bidet might have been a better option, I do think making books in an earlier period where the majority of people can’t read might be wasting time. I did come away thinking about the various supplies I would have filled my time machine with.

If you do plan to make steel, you don’t have to add much carbon to iron to make it. Working out how to measure time is fairly subjective. Unlike North, I think I would focus on making some form of stopwatch first before anything too elaborate. Early Vikings didn’t have anything too elaborate for navigating at sea.

This book, as pointed out above, took a lot longer to read simply because of all the notes and footnotes. If North ever does a second edition, he really needs to consider combining all of the material together to make a cohesive whole than here. Saying that, there is still a lot of useful information here although I think I would also like a manual so I could at least attempt to repair the time machine. It isn’t as though I would need to know all the physics needed, just what parts I need to reproduce and how to find them.

An underlay of interest in alcoholic drink and certain foods does worry me more about North’s interest than the real need for survival. I can understand some level of brevity to keep some level of focus in what could otherwise be potentially dry text. Some of the information should only be carried out by adults and definitely not unsupervised children just in case you want to practice some of the techniques given here.

There is also still the matter of creating a time machine and there is no indication which decade or century that will be in. I doubt if it will be a small HG Wells device but more akin to something from Gallifrey. That being the case, you would certain stock up on some basic devices that you would need for any century you might be trapped in.

]]>https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/how-to-invent-everything-by-ryan-north-book-review/feed/038469The Star Wars Cookbook: Han Sandwiches And Other Galactic Snacks by Lara Starr with photographs by Angie Cao (book review).https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/the-star-wars-cookbook-han-sandwiches-and-other-galactic-snacks-by-lara-starr-with-photographs-by-angie-cao-book-review/
https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/the-star-wars-cookbook-han-sandwiches-and-other-galactic-snacks-by-lara-starr-with-photographs-by-angie-cao-book-review/#respondThu, 15 Nov 2018 10:59:14 +0000https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/?p=38466For the little ‘Star Wars’ fan in your life who are desperate to learn to cook before they go to university and live on cold pizza, this book could help them on their way.

Illustrated with the action figures of Han Solo and Chewbacca, this small book goes where several have gone before (whoops wrong franchise) and tries to make cooking fun for nerds. Sadly, I don’t have time or the spare calories to actually test the recipes so I have applied commonsense to the recipes to see if they should work. The book comes with two sandwich or cookie cutters, the Millennium Falcon and a Wookie head. They are packaged in a cardboard presentation box with a plastic clear top. Do not get me started on packaging because we would be here all day.

The opening instructions are good, covering equipment, skill level and safety aspects for the young cook. Some of the recipes are more challenging and it would have been nice to include that on each recipe. They are all do-able, though, and give the opportunity to learn through experience. There are photos of some of the recipes complete with the action figures, photographer Angie Cao had fun taking those.

The recipes are all variations on a sandwich using everything from normal bread to wraps and rice cakes. There are even some desserts included, as man or Wookie cannot live without sugar. There is plenty of variety and, hopefully, would help make children more adventurous eaters. There are also some egregious puns along the way. The ‘Ham Solo’ is forgiven but the ‘Quesogreedos’ will take some forgetting.

Overall, this is a nice little cookbook that would hopefully inspire and entertain young minds encouraging not only reading but developing cooking skills as well. I’m all for anything that helps spread the idea that everyone, even Han Solo can learn to cook.